Bioinspired Anisotropic Slippery Cilia for Stiffness-Controllable Bubble Transport

Bubbles play a crucial role in multidisciplinary industrial applications, e.g., heat transfer and mass transfer. However, existing methods to manipulate bubbles still face many challenges, such as buoyancy inhibition, hydrostatic pressure, gas dissolving, easy deformability, and so on. To circumvent these constraints, here we develop a bioinspired anisotropic slippery cilia surface to achieve an elegant bubble transport by tuning its elastic modulus, which results from the different contacts of bubbles with cilia, i.e., soft cilia will be easily bent by the bubble motion, while hard cilia will pierce into the bubble, consequently leading to the asymmetric three-phase contact line and resistance force. Moreover, a real-time and arbitrarily directional bubble manipulation is also demonstrated by applying an external magnetic field, enabling the scalable operation of bubbles in a remote manner. Our work exhibits a strategy of regulating bubble behavior smartly, which will update a wide range of gas-related sciences or technologies including gas evolution reactions, heat transfer, microfluidics, and so on.

Automated summary

By tuning the elastic modulus, we have developed a bioinspired surface that can elegantly manipulate bubble transport and achieve real-time and arbitrarily directional bubble manipulation by applying a magnetic field.